APNewsBreak: Philly housing director suing board

Philadelphia's embattled housing director is suing the city agency as he fights to keep his job amid money woes and a string of sexual harassment complaints, his lawyer said.

The federal suit filed Tuesday accuses the Philadelphia Housing Authority of breaching Carl Greene's contract and violating his due process rights, lawyer Clifford Haines said.

Greene, on the job 12 years, earned $350,000 last year running the nation's fourth largest housing agency.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority board and others are investigating how four sexual harassment settlements involving Greene, totaling nearly $900,000, were kept secret for years. Women who worked for Greene said he groped them, demanded sexual favors for promotions and retaliated if they refused him.

Greene has also faced a $50,000 IRS tax lien on outside work and a foreclosure proceedings on his $615,000 townhouse this year. Both debts have since been repaid.

"A court of law is the only place I know of where allegations of the kind alluded to here can be proven - and I'm not talking about delinquent taxes or mortgage payments," lawyer Clifford Haines said Tuesday in a statement. "Those facts are a given and have no bearing on what Carl Greene did or didn't do at PHA."

Greene, 53, has been in an out-of-state medical facility for several weeks to be treated for undisclosed problems, according to Haines.

Greene, in an Aug. 23 letter to the board, said he expected to resume his duties on Sept. 13. He has two years left on his contract.

But the five board members, led by former Mayor John F. Street, voted unanimously on Aug. 26 to put him on indefinite leave while they investigate how the sexual harassment complaints - and payments - were kept secret. The board is supposed to approve any payments over $100,000.

"If and/or when we establish the conspiracy to withhold this information from the board, we must then decide if this action violates the contract. If it does we must then decide if it - and all the other circumstances surrounding Mr. Greene - warrant his being terminated for cause," Street told The Associated Press in a recent e-mail.

Street had long praised Greene as one of the country's best housing executives, and initially reserved judgment on the financial woes. But after the harassment complaints surfaced, his support ended.

"He could have built a billion houses, but if he sexually harassed one woman on the staff, he's gone." Street bellowed to reporters at the Aug. 26 meeting.

Haines complains that Greene, instead of due process, has gotten nothing but an offer to collect his belongings.

"Even Street acknowledged that Greene was operating the finest housing authority in America when all of these putative allegations of wrongdoing were supposed to be going on," Haines said in the statement Tuesday. "That signals loud and clear that whatever Street or others claim Carl did has had absolutely no impact on the operation of PHA."

Current Mayor Michael Nutter has questioned the board's oversight of Greene, putting Street, his predecessor, on the defensive.

"Because Street's own motives are in question here, we think this fiasco needs the supervision of the courts," Haines said.